Not Safe
by irishais
Summary: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Squall/Rinoa.


**_(not_)safe**

_-irishais-_

Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

_xx_

She wakes from a dream, alone in her elaborate four-poster bed, and can still hear the rustling of the swan's wings as they beat hard in her mind. The dream-sounds fade as quickly as they came, and after a moment, she realizes that the beating of the wings have morphed into the steady scream of her alarm clock. She slides the switch to the right, and the room goes silent, nothing but the steady shh-shh of the ceiling fan to keep her company. The clock tells her that it is Tuesday and that it is nearly nine. She takes a minute to let her feet adjust to the cold wood floor before she finally stands.

She opens the window, and listens for the sound of the ocean. It isn't there. Rinoa leaves the sill up anyway.

The water in the shower takes approximately two minutes to warm up enough for her to want to get underneath the spray, and so she spends the time looking at her face in the mirror, pressing at the puffy skin under her eyes to see if it will disappear as easily as she hopes. She gives up, and spends the second minute brushing her teeth. The shower is perfectly warmed when she drops her pajamas to the tile and steps underneath the spray. She sings while she's in there, snippets of popular songs. On days when she is feeling brave, Rinoa sings as much of her mother's song as she can remember. This Tuesday isn't one of those days. She concentrates on scrubbing expensive conditioner in her hair instead.

The towel is monogrammed, a curly "CS" surrounded by gold stitching in the bottom right corner. She found them on clearance in one of the larger department stores, and sometimes wonders what prevented "CS" from picking up their towels from the bridal department. Rinoa likes to imagine it was some horribly tragic story; it's much more interesting than what probably really happened.

The towel goes around her entire body nearly twice, and she tucks the very end in under her arm, leaning over the pile of clothes she has left on the floor to apply moisturizer to her face. The aloe sucks all the warmth out of her face, and her skin tingles. When she leaves the bathroom and crosses the threshold back into her bedroom, the clock tells her that it's Tuesday, and she has ten minutes before she needs to be out the door.

Her closet is categorized by color, from white to black. Blue is conspicuously absent. She pulls out a yellow sun dress, then spends an additional sixty-three seconds trying to root out the shoes that match from the bin below. Dressing takes no time at all; war heroes put their clothes on the same as any other, no matter what the papers say. She spends her last four minutes applying some makeup, and twists her hair up into a knot at the top of her head just as the clock tells her that it is Tuesday, and if she doesn't leave now, she is going to be late.

Timber is warm, so when Rinoa stops at the little cafe on the corner of the next street over, Mami already has a cold tea and two bagels in a bag ready and waiting. She trades the food for the gil Rinoa roots out from the bottom of her purse.

"Have a good one," Mami tells her, with a genuine smile as she rubs her belly. Rinoa tells her to do the same, and to take it easy. Timber's summers are kind, but Mami is heavily pregnant, and though Watts is watching over her constantly, she should be careful. At least there isn't a war on.

Rinoa sips her tea through a bendable straw as she continues down the sidewalk. She stops at the crosswalk, and waits for a car to drive on, luggage strapped to the roof. She doesn't recognize the driver. The ice in her cup rattles as she swishes it around with her straw.

The trains have been running on time for three months now, and even early, because as Rinoa climbs the stairs to the Timber platform, Squall is sitting on a bench near the ticket counter, his duffel at his feet. He looks entirely SeeD despite his t-shirt and jeans, even when his head is tilted back and his eyes are shut.

"You'll get weird tan lines if you sit like that," she chides, coming to a stop directly in front of him, sucking out the last bit of tea with a slurping sound through the straw.

He shrugs. "Whatever." But there's a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, and he lifts his head to look at her. "Hi."

"Hi." Rinoa holds out the bakery bag. "I brought you breakfast."

He takes the bag and then takes her hand, slinging his duffel over his shoulder with a practiced ease as he stands. Rinoa threads her fingers between his as they walk back down the path that she has just taken. Their conversation is limited to the weather, a movie she has just seen, a movie they should go see while he's here. Work is off-limits; it is rule number one.

When they get to her building, he watches as she roots around in her purse for the key— "It can't be that easy to lose something in there," he jokes. Rinoa mimics his "Whatever," with a roll of her eyes and finally comes up successfully with the key.

"You painted," he comments when they finally make it to her doorway and she lets him in, leaning against the wall to fight off her shoes.

She nods, kicking the sandals in the direction of the sofa. The walls are a soft peach, soothing. She spent nearly a week agonizing over the paint chips. "Do you like it?"

He drops his duffel and leans over her, kissing her carefully. She can feel the rough texture of the paint against her shoulders, and she wraps her arms around his neck.

"Yeah," he says, when he pulls back. Rinoa tugs his face back down to her level and kisses him again.

_xx_

The clock says that it is Tuesday, and that it is nearly six fifteen in the evening, when Rinoa wakes up for the second time that day. It's funny, really, how the dreams stop as soon as Squall's weight occupies half of her mattress. She rolls over, reaching for him, and comes up with only empty wrinkled sheets. The shower makes a faint thudding through the slightly open bedroom door. Squall's blue shirt and faded jeans are in a pile in the middle of the floor.

Rinoa stands, plucks his shirt off the floor and pulls it over her head. She manages to get the coffeemaker percolating almost cheerfully by the time the noises from the bathroom stop. Squall glances at her as he crosses from the bathroom back into the bedroom, her white and fluffy CS-monogrammed towel wrapped around his waist. He comes out a moment later with his jeans on in place of the towel. She doesn't deny that she's pleased to discover that he's learned to fold the towel and put it back in the bathroom.

She pours milk into her mug before she adds coffee, and fills a second mug with just coffee. Her back is turned by the time he exits the bathroom, and so she pretends to ignore him as she dutifully empties the filter from the coffeemaker into the trash bin.

"Nice shirt."

"I thought you might like it," she says casually, turning away from the sink to let him admire it. "It's very comfy."

There's a quirk at the corner of his mouth; Rinoa thinks that she's the only one who can make him smile so easily. She doesn't know whether that's a good thing, or a bad thing, though. She'd like to see him smile more. "I can imagine."

She clinks her mug against his and he smiles around the rim.

_xx_

They walk around Timber at night, because there's no more Forest Owls, no more resistance to be fought, now that Galbadia's under a cease-and-desist order. Still, Squall doesn't stop glancing in dark alleys, and Rinoa doesn't stop keeping her eyes open for things that shouldn't be there. She has the entire six blocks around her building memorized. Mami's Cafe is locked up tight against the night air, a sign in the window apologizing for being closed. Rinoa peeks in through where one of the flat blinds is missing; there are only tables with chairs stacked upside down on top.

Squall squeezes her hand, and they walk on.

The diner is open, but because it's Tuesday, there aren't very many customers, and the hostess looks grateful to see them. They get the table in the back, by a window. Squall takes the chair furthest from the glass. Rinoa doesn't comment on it, but sits across from him and opens the menu, studiously scanning the list of things that will probably give her heart failure if she eats any of it. When the waitress comes back, she orders tea and toast. Squall raises an eyebrow, and Rinoa tells him that she's simply going to steal his fries anyway.

In the time it takes for the waitress to come back with their drinks, the last showing at the movie theater across the way has just let out, and for a few minutes, it could be Saturday. Squall looks-without-looking at every person who passes by the window. always on his guard, always waiting for the worst to happen. She used to tease him about it, and then the attack on Quistis and Zell happened in Deling, where the entire front of the restaurant blew in. Rinoa doesn't tease Squall about his seating preferences anymore.

It's strange, sometimes, how there still seems to be a war on. She wonders if anyone else realizes it, and decides it's a silly question to ask. The waitress returns with their drinks, then disappears just as quickly to take care of the people who walk in the front door, in their Tuesday evening finery.

Squall watches her pour a packet of sugar into the cup. She catches him doing it.

"What?"

He shrugs. "Nothing."

Her spoon clinks against the side of the ceramic cup. Squall watches the window instead, and pretends that he isn't.

_xx_

For the first time, she has a dream when Squall is there, his arm heavy around her waist and his breathing regulated against the back of her neck. The swan comes, landing soundlessly against the pool, wings folding neatly back against its sides. Something in her yearns to touch it.

The swan watches her, dark eyes unblinking. It is she who must move first, Rinoa has learned, so she steps forward into the pool, her toes curling against sand-smoothed pebbles as the cold water laps at the soles of her feet. Her skirt grows heavy, yards and yards of cloth billowing out and down, tripping her as she walks. There are two floundering moments where she thinks she is going to go under, and that she will drown.

The water is up to her chest by the time she reaches the swan, still and silent in the center of the lake. It dips its head to her— its feathers are soft against her palm when she reaches to touch it.

"When will it come?" she asks. It is the same question, always the same question, burning somewhere in her chest, as present as her heartbeat, as essential as the inflation and deflation of her lungs.

The swan gazes at her for an eternity, and Rinoa _knows_.

_Her time is soon_.

And with a mighty sound of beating wings, the swan lifts off of the pool and is gone.

Rinoa wakes with the words half spilled out of her own lips, with Squall's voice, sleepy in her ear— "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she says. "Just a dream."

The dream sounds fade as she slips out from underneath the blankets, padding across cool wooden planks to the living room, where she pushes up the sill as high as it will go and breathes in the night air as deeply as she dares. There is a rustling from the bedroom. Rinoa holds her breath. She doesn't know why.

The rustling quits, and she lets out the breath of warm Timber air. On her way back, she stops in the kitchen to pull a cold bottle from the refrigerator. It takes a quarter of the water bottle before the rustling wings disappear from her memory entirely.

Squall is sitting up when she returns, blinking out sleep from his eyes.

"I'm alright," she says, before he can ask her anything. He nods, but doesn't quite relax again until she's back under the covers.

Once he has settled back down next to her again, Rinoa finds that sleep isn't as difficult to achieve as she thought it would be, and this time, she does not dream of anything.

She doesn't know if this is a bad thing.

_xx_

The week passes uninterrupted, Squall's phone ringing only four times--he's left Quistis and Xu in charge, and they're more capable of running Garden than he is, Rinoa thinks. She does not say this aloud. She has no desire to listen to his half-hearted speech about responsibility. That, or an apathetic "Whatever."

He roots his clothes out of the pile of laundry that she has dumped onto the smoothly laid bedspread, folding them with a sort of absentminded precision and setting them aside to go into the bag still stuffed away in Rinoa's closet. She always does his laundry with hers when he visits. It makes her feel better, like they're actually _together_, when they're standing like this in her bedroom, sorting clothing. It's mundane. It's _normal. _It means she doesn't have to dig her clothing out of a canvas bag with "Balamb Garden" stenciled on it, wondering if her pretty summer dresses got washed with someone's blood-soaked uniform.

He tosses a ball of rolled up socks at her gently, and Rinoa looks up from smoothing the creases on a pair of pants. "What?"

"Come with me," he says, and the words sound far more impulsive than the Squall she knows. "For the weekend."

Rinoa sets the pants into their respective pile on the bed. "But you've got to be in Galbadia," she points out. "What'll I do?"

His brow furrows, and Rinoa feels strangely guilty about reminding him about the trip--_mission­, _she corrects herself. It's not a trip when he's got to pack extra rounds and weapons oil in with his socks. "I--"

"Don't worry about it." She waves him off, the fresh pink polish on her nails winking in the sun. "I'm coming there next month, anyway. I don't want to give Quistis more work than she needs."

He nods. "Alright."

Rinoa smiles apologetically, and yanks his dark blue Garden shirt out from the pile.

_xx_

When the laundry is finally folded and packed, they still have two hours until Squall's train is supposed to pull into the station, and so they go for a walk, he with his bag slung over his shoulder and she with her fingers twined into his free hand. Mami isn't working at the cafe today, and when Rinoa asks about her at the register, the girl smiles and shrugs. She rings up their order, and Squall roots out his wallet before Rinoa can even get her bag open.

They eat their lunch sitting on a bench overlooking the train tracks, and Rinoa tries to point out her office window in the Timber Maniacs! building.

"That one," she decides, gesturing high above them. The building's been renovated, the magazine gaining new popularity thanks to a large check with the president of Esthar's signature on it. "No," Rinoa says after a second. "That one, over there. In the corner."

Squall nods seriously, like he's committing the location to memory.

A train pulls in, slow and deliberate, lining itself up carefully with the platform. Rinoa sips at her drink, watching the passengers clamber off in a steady stream. She can hear snippets of conversation from here--crying babies, laughing children, happy adults, glad that they are finally off that train. They split away in small bunches when they leave the cars, heading for the parking lot, crossing the street, some scattering to the benches along the platform, waiting for the next leg of their trip. She wonders where they're going, or where they've all come from.

"Rinoa." Squall's voice is very steady, just as it always is, and so she doesn't look away from the platform as she responds, thinking of all the possible places that the train could have come from. Deling City, Trabia, Esthar, Balamb...

"Yeah?"

His hand is on her elbow suddenly, pulling her hard toward him, and Rinoa lets out a yelp as her drink falls out of her hand, the cup crashing to the ground and tea splashing up onto her nice pink skirt. "_Squall!_" she exclaims, glaring at him indignantly. He doesn't even look at her, on his feet with his hand on her arm, looking past her. She looks.

She looks and sees the blurred form of the Galbadian Express, a splotch of green against the horizon as it rockets into the station.

She looks, and doesn't see anything but a great wave of reds and scraps of green.

She looks, and sees Squall's panicked face as he pulls her toward him, pushing her down on the ground.

She feels his arms tight around her, feels the cotton of his shirt against her face.

She hears screams and glass shattering, she hears the roar of fire, the crumpling of iron and steel.

She hears a terrified scream, high and frightened, and Rinoa clamps her hands hard over her ears to block out the awful sound. It doesn't work.

She smells..._oh, god_, she smells burnt metal, burnt hair, burnt..._everything,_and the scream finally stops when she jerks herself out of Squall's grasp to throw up onto the uneven cobblestones.

_xx_

She wakes up to the beeping of an alarm clock, tellling her that it is nearly seven on a Saturday morning. Rinoa stares at it for a minute, her brain sluggishly trying to process the sound versus the hour. She can't come up with a rational explanation, and so she finally gropes along the top of the clock for its off switch. There is silence. No birds chirping, no pleasant dance of sunlight across her pretty bedspread. Flat lines of light, filtering in through blank white horizontal blinds, cross a plain grey blanket, just soft enough to be tolerable.

The door opens, and Squall steps in, pulling at the collar of his uniform. "Galbadia's taking responsibility for the attack," he says without preamble, finally working open the zipper on the jacket. He sits on the edge of the bed without grace. Rinoa turns her attention to his profile, tracing the bridge of his nose and the slope of his forehead, the lines of his lips and the curve of his chin, her eyes going from hairline to jawline and back again.

"Sleep alright?" he says finally.

Rinoa shrugs. Squall nods, his hair falling into his eyes with the motion, and he shoves it out of his face carelessly.

They sit in silence, and she traces the lines of his profile as he stares at the wall.


End file.
